Reply To: Order archive based on custom post object metakey value

• Jonathan

• June 16, 2015 at 1:42 am

Hi Steve,

You can’t do what you’re asking just by modifying the wp_query with pre_get_posts.. Atleast not by querying artwork.

However, you can instead of directly querying artwork and trying to order those query the artists.
So you would do a custom wp_query for all artists and order them by their lastname like so:

$args = array(
'post_type' => 'artist',
'orderby' => 'meta_value',
'meta_key' => 'surname',
'posts_per_page' => -1
);

Then as you loop through each artist you query their artwork (inside the artist loop).

$artist_ID = get_the_ID();
$artwork_args = array(
	'post_type' => 'artwork',
	'posts_per_page' => -1,
	'meta_query' => array(
		array(
			'key' => 'artist_dropdown',
			'value' => $artist_ID,
			'compare' => '='
		)
	)
);